I created a "hot image" before I even knew what one was or how ill advised the method was. The sorce drive was showing signs of dying and when it nfinally did, I felt confident that I would have no problem restoring to my new drive. Ha!

The restore goes well until the progress meter gets to about 70%. Then it rushes to 99% and then gives the header mismatch error. I have tried restoring from both windows and the restore environment and nothing.

Symantec's website lists this as a partition magic error. Symantec's tech support is useless.

One thing that may be notewothy is that the image is of an 80gig (single primary partition) drive and the new drive is a 160 by a different manufacturer. In the restore function setup, the box for expanding the drive to fit the image is greyed out.

Is there any program that can open .v2i files so that I can at least get all of my pictures from the image? losing those would be catastrophic. Image browser doesn't seem to work, although I vaguely recall being able to browse the unencoded files in the past.

This site seems to be the most well informed source for info regarding Ghost 9.0 so I'll wait to hear back fom you all before killing myself.

"... The source drive was showing signs of dying and when it finally did..."

I had a rewarding experience in making a successful "cold-imaging (whole)disk-to-image" legacy Norton Ghost Backup of a Compaq Presario MN1650NX desktop PC in its dying throes. Afterwards, I came to the conclusion that Norton Ghost Ver 8.2 was indeed a robust product as it achieved the task without a qualm in WIN PE whereas a previous attempt with v2003 running in DOS was riddled with error messages.

Since there are instances of "death-bed" recoveries of the contents of morbid HDDs, the obvious question is to address the present whereabouts of the stricken 80GB HDD. If it is available, then we can perform a bit of trickery to go forward on the assumption that gaining a whole-disk image would alleviate some of your obvious distress.

How old is the image?Where is the image stored? External HD? DVD?Was the HD showing problems when the image was taken?Did the image "verify" when it was first created?Does the image "verify" from the Recovery Environment prior to the restore.Any chkdsk problems with the HDs you are using at present?Have you used a BartPE CD?

Quote:

I have tried restoring from both windows and the restore environment

How did you do the former? Do you have Ghost 9 installed in Win XP on that 160 GB HD? If so I'd try mounting the image. Double click the .v2i file and click Mount. If it works you can drag and drop your data. I note the Backup Image Browser doesn't work. Does the image "verify" now from Windows?

The original 80g seems to spin up but appears to be unreadable when inserted into the laptop or when connected to the usb-ide adapter that I am also using to trouble shoot. I am open to suggestions with regard to reviving this puppy.

The image is about a month old and is stored on a brand new Western Digital 500 gig usb drive. The 80gig source drive was occasionally booting up with drive read errors so I thought best to back up. My previous image was on a different external drive that croaked not too long ago, thus the new WD.

I don't recall if the image verified when it was created but I will assume so because I would not have let something like that go. It does verify prior to the restore process.

I ran chkdsk on both drives from the windows XP system menu. The DOS version has proved tricky to run as it is not bundled in with my Toshiba satellite M35 xp recovery disk (Which actually restores the system using ghost 8.0!).

I haven't used BartPE yet, but that is definitely my next step.

I did load xp and ghost on to the 160g drive but I did not try to mount the drive. Does that delete the image after mounting? I'll try mounting from a copy...just in case.

but I did not try to mount the drive. Does that delete the image after mounting? I'll try mounting from a copy...just in case.

No problems with mounting the backup image. It doesn't delete the backup image. You can dismount the drive when you are finished or just restart and the mounted drive will be gone. Try that first and at least you should be able to recover your pictures etc.

I noticed that your new laptop HD is 160 GB? Are you still interested in restoring the image even though you have an OS on that HD? Restoring from the external HD may be the problem. I'd create two partitions on the internal HD, copy the image to the second partition and then try to restore without using the external HD.

On the other hand, you have imaged a bad HD so it might not be a good idea to restore that image.

"... The original 80g seems to spin up but appears to be unreadable when inserted into the laptop or when connected to the usb-ide adapter that I am also using to trouble shoot..."

I am unapologetically one of those "cold-imaging" dudes who strip installation CDs of the boxed retail version of Norton Ghost 10 to render the essential legacy Norton Ghost Version 8.2 elements -

restoreghost.exe

which we rename

ghost32.exe

in addition to

ghostexp.exe

. We even go so far as to incorporate these essential components of the "cold-imaging" Ghost Ver 8.2 into rather elegant bootable Reatogo-X-PE CDs running in the Windows XP Preinstalled Environment as depicted below (note menu of Ghost32 switch choices).

ONLY AFTER ALL ELSE FAILS, I will then advocate attempting to revive the stricken 80GB HDD.